Jean-Paul Sartre

Jean-Paul Sartre:
Mind and Body, Word and Deed

Edited by

Jean-Pierre Boulé and Benedict O’Donohoe

 Jean-Paul Sartre:
Mind and Body, Word and Deed,
Edited by Jean-Pierre Boulé and Benedict O’Donohoe

This book first published 2011

Cambridge Scholars Publishing

12 Back Chapman Street, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2XX, UK

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Copyright © 2011 by Jean-Pierre Boulé and Benedict O’Donohoe and contributors

All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system,
or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or
otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner.

ISBN (10): 1-4438-2949-8, ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-2949-6

For Lya; and for Zoé—always
J-PB

To Tom and Ania and Lucas

BPO’D
 CONTENTS

Introduction ................................................................................................. 1
Jean-Pierre Boulé and Benedict O’Donohoe

Part I: Sartre and the Body

Chapter One ................................................................................................. 9

Sartre’s Treatment of the Body in Being and Nothingness:
The “Double Sensation”
Dermot Moran

Chapter Two .............................................................................................. 27

Living and Knowing Pain: Sartre’s Engagement with Maine de Biran
Michael Gillan Peckitt

Chapter Three ............................................................................................ 41

Jean-Paul Sartre and Didier Anzieu: Consensuality
Naomi Segal

Chapter Four .............................................................................................. 53

“The Childhood of a Leader” Revisited: Salauds and Moustaches
Gary Cox

Part II: Sartre and Time

Chapter Five .............................................................................................. 65

Sartre’s Timetable
François Noudelmann

Chapter Six ................................................................................................ 71

How Sartre and Beauvoir Worked Together
Michel Contat
viii Table of Contents

Part III: Sartre: Ideology and Politics

Chapter Seven............................................................................................ 93
France and Cuba, Castro and De Gaulle: Revisiting Sartre’s
“Ouragan sur le Sucre”
John Ireland

Chapter Eight ........................................................................................... 111

What Can Philosophers Teach Politicians?
Jean-Pierre Boulé

Chapter Nine .................................................................................. 131

Sartre’s Concept of Man: Existentialism and Feminism
Sawada Nao

Chapter Ten ............................................................................................. 149

Murakami, Obama, Sarkozy: What is an Intellectual?
Benedict O’Donohoe

Part IV: Sartre in Japan

Chapter Eleven ........................................................................................ 167

How to Welcome an Intellectual Superstar: Sartre and the Japanese
Press in 1966
Suzuki Masamichi

Chapter Twelve ....................................................................................... 183

An Intellectual Star Remembered: Sartre’s 1966 Visit to Japan
Suzuki Michihiko with Sawada Nao

Contributors ............................................................................................. 203

 INTRODUCTION

JEAN-PIERRE BOULÉ
AND BENEDICT O’DONOHOE

What does Sartrean existentialism look like in the twenty-first century?

We are proposing a multi-faceted portrait which reflects Sartre’s mind and
body, his words and deeds. We do so cognizant of the fact that these
categories could be regarded as tautological. After all, Sartre himself
insisted that language was also action, and that no human person was ever
more or less than the sum of their deeds, “nothing but what one makes of
oneself”. He also emphasised the inseparability of mind and body, the
embodiment of consciousness, without which, famously, consciousness is
nothingness.
Nevertheless, these are useful categories in critical method, the more
so as Sartre discovered empirically that the conflation of the two elements
of each binary pair was by no means a given. The enactment of
language—the transition from the spoken or written word to the making of
a real change in the world by deeds—became the mission and obsession of
the “committed” post-war philosopher, whether writing epic or satirical
theatre and fiction, abstruse dialectics and polemical essays, or visiting
Castro in Cuba and the intelligentsia in Japan, or supporting student
protest on the streets of Paris, implicitly daring De Gaulle to arrest this
twentieth-century Voltaire. Even addressing the proletariat directly,
outside the Renault factory at Boulogne-Billancourt in 1972, or visiting
Andreas Baader in Stammheim prison in 1974, Sartre could never be
confident that his millions of eloquent words had indeed achieved any real
change in the world.
Moreover, although Sartre’s consciousness was of course embodied, it
was rather less so than most. He stood about five feet tall (152
centimetres), tiny for a European male in the mid-twentieth century. If
“not quite a dwarf”, as he ruefully observes in the autobiographical Les
Mots (Words), he took after his father’s side of the family rather than his
mother’s, to the manifest consternation of his lanky maternal grandfather.
Sartre was customarily known to his circle of friends as le petit homme
2 Introduction

(the little man), who also said of him ça pense tout le temps (he never
stops thinking): a pocket-sized person with a brain the size of a planet, we
might say in the modern vernacular. It is as if Sartre’s body and mind were
in inverse proportion to each other, the condensed and pent-up energy of
the former exploding in the hyper-activity of the latter, spilling ink
promiscuously over a plethora of genres—and to such effect!
Uniquely in twentieth-century European literature, Sartre can claim
masterpieces in philosophy, the novel, the short story, the drama and the
polemical essay; to say nothing of literary criticism, biography and auto-
biography. He also wrote diaries, travelogues, art criticism, journalism,
letters—thousands of letters—and, with somewhat less distinction, screen-
plays for the cinema. When the Gallimard Pléiade edition of his Œuvres
romanesques (Works of Prose Fiction) appeared in 1981, he accomplished
the childhood dream he had dreamt in his grandfather’s library of
becoming a name embossed in gold on the spine of a leather-bound book.
However, he had also, with characteristically self-contestatory irony,
disappeared himself the previous year.
In an attempt to honour Sartre’s astonishing polymathic range, we have
divided this book into four sections: (i) Sartre and the Body, (ii) Sartre and
Time, (iii) Sartre: Ideology and Politics, and (iv) Sartre in Japan. These
divisions reflect the interests of scholars from the UK, the US, France,
Ireland and Japan, who gave papers at Sartre Society conferences in Tokyo
and London in 2009, some with the support of AHRC funding.1
“Sartre and the Body” reappraises Sartre’s work in dialogue with other
philosophers, his predecessors, contemporaries and successors. “Sartre and
Time” offers “philosophy in practice” accounts of how this unstoppable
“book-making machine” (see Les Mots again) actually worked. “Sartre and
Politics” uses Sartrean notions of intellectual engagement, political
commitment and revolutionary praxis to address contemporary questions,
including insights into world leaders, past and present—Castro, De Gaulle,
Sarkozy, Obama: Sartre, the incorrigible intellectual who simply could not
“mind his own business”, still has something to say about each of them
today. Finally, an important but overlooked episode of Sartre’s life—his
month-long visit to Japan in September–October 1966—is narrated from
two contrasting perspectives: first, that of a young Japanese scholar who
has made an exhaustive analysis of Sartre’s reception in the media; next,
that of a very senior Japanese scholar who, as a young man, was actively
involved in that reception both as participant and as interpreter at Sartre’s

1
The Editors duly acknowledge the financial assistance of the AHRC which
facilitated, specifically, the participation of Boulé, Noudelmann and O’Donohoe in
Tokyo, and that of Nao Sawada and Masamichi Suzuki in London.
 Jean-Paul Sartre: Mind and Body, Word and Deed 3

various lectures and debates. This truly unique and precious first-hand
testimony concludes the volume.
“Sartre and the Body” opens with Dermot Moran who revisits the
crucial philosophical problem of embodiment to argue that Sartre’s L’Être
et le néant (Being and Nothingness) advances a ground-breaking, but
neglected, phenomenology of embodiment. Sartre’s account strongly
influenced Merleau-Ponty’s, but differs from his in important respects.
Moran returns to Sartre’s original account, discusses his debt to Husserl,
and in particular re-examines his analysis of the flesh, the touch, and his
critique of the “double sensation” (the experience of one hand touching the
other). In “Living and Knowing Pain: Sartre’s Engagement with Maine de
Biran”, Michael Gillan Peckitt explores and challenges Sartre’s view of
the role of sensation in the body as it pertains to pain. Using the work of
the phenomenologist Michel Henry, Peckitt argues that Sartre’s “anti-
Biranism” needs to be modified—in particular, his notions of lived and
known in application to the body—to accommodate certain quasi-Biranian
notions, if he is to produce an accurate phenomenology of pain. Peckitt
argues a third way of experiencing the body which is between the lived
and the known.
Naomi Segal’s object of study is the psychic skin, leaning on the work
of Didier Anzieu and using his most important theory, that of the moi-peau
(skin-ego). Segal argues that desire is a component, but not the only
component, of love: the wish to be held, in Anzieu’s sense, is central.
Segal compares elements of the theories of Sartre and Anzieu, revealing
some possibly surprising similarities in their theories of love. In the last
chapter of this section—“‘The Childhood of a Leader’ Revisited: Salauds
and Moustaches”—Gary Cox teases out the range of complex philo-
sophical ideas in Sartre’s longest short story, “L’Enfance d’un chef”.
Primarily, this details one person’s slide into the kind of chronic, cowardly
and morally repugnant “bad faith” which, for Sartre, characterises the
bourgeoisie, whom he denounced en masse in his earlier novel, La Nausée
(Nausea), as salauds (shits, bastards). Posturing—being a poseur—is
essential for and to the salaud. Cox brings a novel dimension to thinking
of Sartre and the body by concentrating upon the moustache as
emblematic of the serious-minded, complacent bourgeois: Lucien, the
protagonist in “Childhood”, completes the construction of his false object-
self by growing a moustache.
In the next section, “Sartre and Time”, François Noudelmann studies
Sartre’s time(table) and illustrates how he used his body and his mind.
Taking as an example Sartre’s work on Flaubert, Noudelmann underpins
his own study by explaining that Sartre presupposed that everything makes
4 Introduction

sense in an existence in order to constitute a life, even what seems to lie

outside the individual’s intentions. This totalising approach articulates two
contiguous and complex notions: life and existence, which Noudelmann
then applies to Sartre himself, unmasking his secret temporalities, such as
playing the piano, in a detotalising manoeuvre which, through its segmen-
tation(s), (re-)composes the tempos of life. Noudelmann also evokes
Sartre’s and Beauvoir’s seemingly “transparent relationship”, and this is
the focus of Michel Contat’s chapter. Specifically, Contat examines the
famous couple’s politics of “common time” and how they “worked
together”. He tracks their partnership in their respective works and
concentrates on their one thoroughgoing collaboration, namely a dialogue
published by Simone de Beauvoir in 1981, as the second part of her
memoir, Adieux: A Farewell to Sartre. This dialogue is composed
thematically, like Beauvoir’s memoir Tout compte fait (All Said and
Done), and Contat’s intertextual method brings out the parallels between
the two. Working through analyses of themes including “the body” and
“music”, this dialogue culminates in a reaffirmation of Sartre’s atheism as
constitutive of his philosophy of freedom.
Sartre’s inseparable words and deeds are the focus of the third section,
“Ideology and Politics”, where a dialogue is set up between Sartre and
contemporary political figures. John Ireland analyses two series of articles
by Sartre on Cuba, the first of which was published in the French daily,
France-Soir, in the 1960s, the second of which has only recently come to
light. Under the metaphorical title: “Ouragan sur le sucre” (“Hurricane in
the Sugarcane”), Sartre anatomised the Cuban revolution, to the
unmitigated advantage of Fidel Castro and the merciless detriment of
Charles De Gaulle. Ireland argues that Sartre’s portrait of Castro as a
revolutionary political leader is fashioned in direct opposition to his image
of De Gaulle. He concludes that these articles opened up a confrontation
between, on the one hand, Sartre’s high hopes for the Cuban revolution in
practice and, on the other, the much more pessimistic prognoses of socio-
political change formulated by the theorist of the Critique de la raison
dialectique (Critique of Dialectical Reason), which was in press at the
time of Sartre’s Cuban visit. Extending the political theme in his chapter,
“What Can Philosophers Teach Politicians?”, Jean-Pierre Boulé subjects
the discourse of French President Nicolas Sarkozy on “May 68” to a
Sartrean analysis, revealing that—whilst denouncing the spirit of May
68—Sarkozy in fact appropriates left-wing rhetoric: Sarkozy’s aspiration
to be a “new politician” is compared and contrasted with Sartre’s status as
a “new intellectual”. Boulé gradually discloses the Gaullist heritage in
 Jean-Paul Sartre: Mind and Body, Word and Deed 5

Sarkozy’s discourse, thereby demonstrating that philosophers can indeed

teach politicians—about ethics.
In “Sartre’s Concept of Man: Existentialism and Feminism”, Nao
Sawada confronts Sartre’s “word”, and the word is “man”.2 He analyses
the different ways in which Sartre uses the term “man” in a number of
contexts—including homosexuality, femininity and cowardice—concen-
trating on his major philosophical and literary works, Being and
Nothingness and The Roads to Freedom. After an occasionally surprising
itinerary through Sartrean euphemism, innuendo and implication, Sawada
brings his argument back to the contemporary world—equally threatened
by natural and man-made catastrophe, as recent events have shown all too
starkly—and innovatively advocates a “feminine Sartrean existentialism”.3
Steering the conversation towards Japan, Benedict O’Donohoe enquires:
“What is an Intellectual?” He considers the credentials of Barack Obama
(well-known as a convincing candidate—for the presidency, at least),
Nicolas Sarkozy (recently converted to Sartre), and Haruki Murakami,
whose hybrid work, Underground: The Tokyo Gas Attack and the
Japanese Psyche, arguably satisfies the criteria set down by Sartre for the
writer-qua-intellectual in his Japan lectures.
The fourth and final section of this book, “Sartre in Japan”, is also
concerned with word and deed. First, Masamichi Suzuki’s forensic
account of Sartre’s reception by the Japanese press in 1966 offers both the
most thorough contextualisation and the most detailed analysis to date of
Sartre’s Japan lectures, “Plaidoyer pour les intellectuels” (“Apologia for
the Intellectual”, already touched upon by Boulé and O’Donohoe). Using
press archives, Masamichi Suzuki analyses the Japanese media’s role in
constructing the image of an “intellectual superstar”, before turning his
attention to the role of intellectuals in Japan today, where he finds no
“charismatic figures comparable to Sartre”.
Our volume then closes with a rare document indeed: Michihiko
Suzuki—who met Sartre and Beauvoir when they came to Japan and
remained in contact with them thereafter—is interviewed by Nao Sawada.

2
To avoid confusion, we have, in this Introduction and in the list of Contributors,
deployed the European convention of forename / surname, e.g. Haruki Murakami,
Nao Sawada, Masamichi Suzuki, Michihiko Suzuki. Elsewhere, in the relevant
chapters, we have respected the Japanese convention of surname / forename.
3
At the time of final editing (March 2011), we wish to pay tribute to our Japanese
colleagues—and to at least one other contributor with family in Japan—who have
continued to respond to our last-minute missives with characteristic courtesy and
calm efficiency, despite the stresses that they and their compatriots have been
placed under by the Sendai earthquake and its terrible aftermath.
6 Introduction

In this fascinating eye-witness account of Sartre’s and Beauvoir’s visit—

and their various lectures, debates, and round-table discussions—Professor
Suzuki talks candidly, and often humorously, about his own, his
contemporaries’ and his country’s relationships with Sartrean existen-
tialism, over a span of half a century. En route, he underscores Sartre’s
progressive thinking on colonialism, and his remarkable precognition of
May 68 with the Critique of Dialectical Reason. Above all, thanks to
Professor Suzuki’s compendious knowledge of Sartre’s thought and work,
and to Nao Sawada’s perspicacious questioning and congenial encourage-
ment, the reader is invited both to participate “virtually” in Sartre’s
memorable Japanese excursion, and to perambulate through his entire
intellectual itinerary. In short, Professor Suzuki demonstrates admirably
the extraordinary range, originality and vitality of Jean-Paul Sartre in mind
and body, word and deed: “A whole man, made up of all men, worth any
one of them, and any one of them worth him.”4

4
“Tout un homme, fait de tous les hommes, et qui les vaut tous et que vaut
n’importe qui.” (Sartre, the last sentence of Les Mots.)
 PART I:

SARTRE AND THE BODY

 CHAPTER ONE

SARTRE’S TREATMENT OF THE BODY

IN BEING AND NOTHINGNESS:
THE “DOUBLE SENSATION”

DERMOT MORAN

Sartre’s innovative analysis of embodiment:

flesh and intercorporeity
Jean-Paul Sartre’s chapter entitled “The Body” (“Le corps”) in his
Being and Nothingness1 has regrettably been somewhat overlooked as a
vital philosophical analysis of embodiment yet it is, by any standards, a
ground-breaking piece of great subtlety and originality that deserves a
fuller exploration.2 For instance, Sartre should be credited with intro-
ducing the key concept of “the flesh” (la chair), which is so fundamental
to Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s later philosophy, and which is often thought
to have originated with him. Another original aspect of Sartre’s account is
his discussion of intercorporeity (intercorporéité—a term that Merleau-
Ponty employs in his later work—meaning the bodily engagement
between lived bodies). While the term “intercorporeity” itself does not

1
Sartre, L’Être et le néant. Essai d’ontologie phénoménologique (1943, Being and
Nothingness, hereafter BN, followed first by the English pagination and then by
that of the French original). A draft of this chapter was given as a paper at the
conference of the UK Sartre Society at the Institut Français, South Kensington, in
September 2009.
2
Of course, one should not assume that everything Sartre says about the body is to
be found in the chapter bearing that title. In fact, there are discussions of the body
throughout Being and Nothingness. In particular, his discussion of hunger and
desire, for instance, in the chapter on “Concrete Relations with Others”, continues
the analysis of the experience of one’s own body and of the flesh of the other. For
recent discussions of Sartre on embodiment, see Katherine J. Morris (ed.), Sartre
on the Body.
10 Chapter One

appear in Being and Nothingness, nevertheless, the dynamic visual and

tactual relations between the living bodies of conscious subjects has a
central place. For Sartre, the flesh is presented as both the locus of
contingency and also as the point of contact with the flesh of the other.
Flesh is, as Sartre puts it, “the pure contingency of presence” (BN, 343;
410).3 It is our incarnation in the world in precisely this inescapable
manner, our being “thrown” into the world. At the same time, my flesh
“constitutes”—as Husserl would say; Sartre uses different expressions—
the other’s flesh, especially in the acts of touching and caressing:

The caress reveals the Other’s flesh as flesh to myself and to the Other
[…] it is my body as flesh which causes the Other’s flesh to be born [qui
fait naître la chair d’autrui]. The caress is designed to cause the Other’s
body to be born, through pleasure, for the Other—and for myself—as a
touched passivity in such a way that my body is made flesh in order to
touch the Other’s body with its own passivity; that is, by caressing itself
with the Other’s body rather than by caressing her. (BN, 390; 459-60)

In fact, in Being and Nothingness, Sartre objects to the Cartesian

manner in which Husserl claims the other is constituted within my own
subjectivity (according to the dominant tradition of reading the Fifth
Cartesian Meditation). Sartre claims rather to interpret Heidegger’s
conception of the solitude of Dasein when he asserts: “We encounter the
Other, we do not constitute him.”4 But Sartre also believes that I make
myself flesh in order to experience the other as flesh (see the complex
discussion at BN, 389; 458). I turn myself into flesh, as it were; I become
the soft body that greets the other.
Sartre’s chapter on “The Body” maps out much of the ground that is
later retraced by Maurice Merleau-Ponty in his Phenomenology of
Perception5, which appeared two years after Sartre’s opus and was deeply
influenced by it. Indeed, even Merleau-Ponty’s last unfinished project,

3
Sartre develops the notion of the “flesh” (la chair) from Husserl’s conception of
Leibhaftigkeit, the bodily presence of the object in perception. Indeed, Sartre
already talks about the “flesh of the object in perception” in an earlier 1940 study,
L’Imaginaire (see Sartre, The Psychology of Imagination, 15). The French
translation of leibhaftig in Husserlian texts (as also cited by Merleau-Ponty and
Levinas) is en chair et en os, meaning literally “in flesh and bone”.
4
“On rencontre autrui, on ne le constitue pas.” (BN, 250; 307.)
5
Phénoménologie de la perception (1945, Phenomenology of Perception,
henceforth PP, followed first by the page number of the English translation, then
by that of the French edition).
 Sartre’s Treatment of the Body in Being and Nothingness 11

published posthumously as The Visible and the Invisible6, is heavily

indebted to Sartre’s explorations. To name some of the themes which
Sartre discusses a few years in advance of Merleau-Ponty, one can point to
the discussion of the artificiality of the psychological (behaviourist)
concept of sensation; the intrinsic temporality of experience; the Müller–
Lyer illusion; the Gestalt figure-ground relation; the “double sensation”
(one hand touching the other); and so on. Sartre’s overall account of the
embodied subject, and of his or her encounters with other embodied
subjects, is in many ways more far-reaching than Merleau-Ponty’s. It is
certainly far more dramatic. It is therefore worthwhile revisiting Sartre’s
discussion of the body in Being and Nothingness.

Sartre’s three ontological conceptions of the body

Written in Sartre’s customary dialectical and sometimes tortured style,
this long chapter is dense, difficult, and confused, yet it also throws up
many brilliant insights. Being and Nothingness claims to be, according to
its subtitle, an “essay of phenomenological ontology”7, and—as part of
this project—in this chapter Sartre is proposing a new multi-dimensional
approach to the body that he terms “ontological” in opposition to
traditional epistemological approaches found in modern philosophy. For
Sartre, traditional philosophy has misunderstood the body precisely
because it has conflated or inverted the orders of knowing and being.8
Sartre’s starting point, of course, is the phenomenological discussion
of embodiment as he creatively interpreted it from his readings of Edmund
Husserl (drawn presumably from passages in Husserl’s then published
works—namely Logical Investigations, Ideas I, Formal and Trans-
cendental Logic, and Cartesian Meditations—since he had no direct
access to the then unpublished Ideas II, apart possibly from conversations
he might have had with his friend Maurice Merleau-Ponty).9 Sartre also

6
Le Visible et l’invisible (1964, The Visible and the Invisible, hereafter TVTI,
followed by the pagination of the English translation).
7
William McBride has commented on Sartre’s subtitle in his chapter “Sartre and
Phenomenology”, in Lawlor (see especially page 72).
8
Sartre speaks variously of the “order of being” (l’ordre de l’être, BN 305; 367),
“orders of reality” (ordres de réalité, BN, 304; 366), and “ontological levels”
(plans ontologiques, BN, 305; 367).
9
Edmund Husserl, Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenolo-
gischen Philosophie. Zweites Buch: Phänomenologische Untersuchungen zur Kon-
stitution (Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological
Philosophy, Second Book, hereafter cited as Ideas II, followed by the English
12 Chapter One

read Max Scheler10, and was hugely influenced by Martin Heidegger’s

analysis of Dasein in Being and Time (which Sartre, following the French
custom of the time, translates as la réalité humaine, human reality).11
Sartre’s academic formation would also have made him familiar with the
established French tradition of physiological and psychological discussion
of the body in relation to consciousness that stems from Descartes, and is
elaborated in the work of Condillac, Maine de Biran, Comte, Bergson,
Brunschwicg12, Pradines13, Marcel14, Bachelard, and others. The idealist
Léon Brunschwicg, a professor at the Sorbonne, was one of Sartre’s
philosophy teachers at the École Normale Supérieure and another formative
influence. Similarly, Sartre refers to Gaston Bachelard’s L’Eau et les rêves
in his chapter on the body.15 Sartre’s sources are diverse but he absorbs
them into his own original and creative vision. In particular, his
interpretation of phenomenology casts it as a philosophy of exteriority, no
longer trapped in the epistemological paradigm. Intentionality means
being thrust into the world.
The main purpose of Sartre’s chapter on the body is to claim that one
has to distinguish between different ontological orders in relation to the
body. He means “ontology” in a phenomenological sense (deeply influenced
by Heidegger); the ontological domain is the domain of phenomenality, of

pagination, the Husserliana (Hua) volume number and the German pagination).
Sartre of course read Husserl’s published writings, but had little access to the
unpublished drafts, except perhaps through Merleau-Ponty, who was receiving
material from Herman Leo van Breda, Director of the Husserl Archives in Leuven,
even during the German occupation (see H. L. van Breda, History of the Husserl
Archives).
10
For an interesting survey of the role of the body in Scheler’s writings, see
Daniela Vallega-Neu, “Driven Spirit”.
11
Before writing Being and Nothingness (while in the POW camp Stalag XIID at
Triers), Sartre read Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit (1927) and his 1929 essay “What is
Metaphysics?”, as well as some of his later essays of the 1930s and early 1940s.
Although, strictly speaking, the body hardly makes an appearance in Being and
Time, Sartre interprets the facticity and contingency of Dasein’s “Being-in-the-
world” as referring primarily to our embodiment.
12
See, for instance, Brunschwicg, L’Expérience humaine et la causalité physique
(1922), which is also criticized by Merleau-Ponty in PP (see 54-56; 67-69).
13
Maurice Pradines, a follower of Bergson, taught Levinas at Strasbourg. See his
Philosophie de la Sensation, I: Le Problème de la sensation (1928), listed by
Merleau-Ponty in his bibliography to PP (see also PP, 13n; 20n).
14
Gabriel Marcel, Être et avoir (1918–33, Being and Having).
15
Gaston Bachelard, L’Eau et les rêves: essai sur l’imagination de la matière
(1942, Water and Dreams: An Essay on the Imagination of Matter).
 Sartre’s Treatment of the Body in Being and Nothingness 13

the manifest. The body has different modes of manifestation. The body
manifests itself within my experience in one way, and there is another
quite different experience of the body given from the perspective of the
other. Sartre distinguishes the body as it is “for me” or “for oneself” (pour-
soi) and the body as it is “for others” or “for the other” (pour-autrui).
These dimensions are, Sartre claims, “incommunicable” and “irreconcilable”.
The first ontological dimension addresses the way that, as Sartre puts it, “I
exist my body” (j’existe mon corps, BN, 351; 428), the body as non-thing,
as medium for my experience of the world, but also as somehow
surpassed or transcended towards the world. This is le corps-existé, the
body as lived from the first-person perspective, as opposed to le corps-vu,
the body as seen from the perspective of the other (BN, 358; 426), or of
myself now in the position of an external observer of my body.
The second ontological dimension of the body refers to the manner in
which my body is experienced and indeed utilized by the other (BN, 351;
418), and utilized by myself occupying the role of third-person observer of
my body. This includes my ready-to-hand equipmental engagement with
the world and my body as the “tool of tools”. Sartre claims that “the
original relation between things […] is the relation of instrumentality”
(BN, 200; 250). There are further characteristics of embodiment that relate
to these points of view of mine and other; the body can be experienced as
a physical thing, and no more; but it is also an instrument through which
other things are disclosed: “Either it [the body] is a thing among other
things, or else it is that by which things are revealed to me. But it cannot
be both at the same time” (BN, 304; 366). For Sartre, I come to understand
the other’s body as a certain kind of tool for me and then, by analogy, I
come to understand my own body as a tool: “The Other’s body appears to
me here as one instrument in the midst of other instruments, not only as a
tool to make tools but also as a tool to manage tools, in a word as a tool
machine” (BN, 320; 384).
Sartre posits a third ontological dimension that is far more
complicated: it is the manner in which “I exist for myself as a body known
by the other” (BN, 351; 419), what Martin Dillon has characterized as “the
body-for-itself-for-others”.16 This, for Sartre, captures both the dimension
of facticity—I do not control myself completely and have, as it were, to
accept its undeniable presence in the public world—and at the same time
the intersubjective dimension; I have the definite experience of my body
as it is experienced by others, and this is filtered in many different ways in

16
See Martin C. Dillon, “Sartre on the Phenomenal Body and Merleau-Ponty’s
Critique”, in Stewart, especially page 126.
14 Chapter One

our “concrete relations with others”. Indeed, it is true to say that Sartre has
explored the dialectics of this intersubjective co-constitution of my body
more than any other phenomenologist (with the possible exception of
Levinas). This third dimension of the body includes the manner in which I
experience it under the gaze or “look” (le regard) of the other, as in the
case of shame or embarrassment. I experience how the other sees me, even
in the physical absence of the other: “With the appearance of the Other’s
look I experience the revelation of my being-as-object, that is, of my
transcendence as transcended” (BN, 351; 419).
In the first way of experiencing my body, I experience myself
primarily, as Husserl puts it, as a series of “I can’s”, whereby my capacities
to do something introduce transcendence into my current situation. I am
here but I can look over there, move over there, and so on. This is what
Sartre means by “transcendence”: I have the capacity from the very
intentionality and ontological make-up of the “for-itself” to be always
beyond my exact current situation. However, in the public sphere, in
relations to others, as in this third way of experiencing my body, my
transcending freedom is now inhibited or, as Sartre puts it, “transcended”.
I am, Sartre says, “imprisoned in an absence” (BN, 363; 430). And,
similarly, I too inhibit the other: “From the moment that I exist, I establish
a factual limit to the Other’s freedom. I am this limit and each of my
projects traces the outline of this limit around the Other” (BN, 409: 480).
“Conflict is the original meaning of being-for-others”17, Sartre asserts
at the beginning of his chapter on “Concrete Relations with Others”. This
mutual relationship of self to the other also intimately involves the
constitution of my body which remains, for Sartre, a contested domain.
There is—and here Sartre draws heavily on Kojève’s reading of Hegel’s
Phenomenology of Spirit—a struggle to the death going on between my
desire to impose myself freely and transcend myself towards the situation,
and my experience of being defined and delimited by the other, over
which I have very little power. My existence places a limitation on the
other and vice-versa, but there are many modes of accommodation within
this vital dance between us.
Indeed, it is this third intersubjectively constituted ontological dimen-
sion of embodiment that has perhaps found most resonance (although
rarely with acknowledgement to Sartre) in the social and political language
of empowerment, of assertion of one’s own sense of self over and against
the assignment of meaning conferred by the other, as found in the politics

17
“Le conflit est le sens original de l’être-pour-autrui” (BN, 364; 431).
 Sartre’s Treatment of the Body in Being and Nothingness 15

of gender, for instance.18 Sartre’s account is deserving of much closer

scrutiny in this regard. It is surprisingly subtle and sensitive to the
complexities of the dynamics of these relations.

The body as “psychic object”

Sartre begins from the concrete, phenomenologically experienced unity
of body and consciousness, with the body as lived and experienced from
within (although that spatial metaphor is shown to be inadequate), from the
first-person perspective. This experience cannot be characterized either as
pure consciousness or as physical thinghood. The lived, experienced
body—corresponding to Husserl’s Leib—can never be construed purely as
a transcendent object (even in the most extreme efforts at self-
objectification), and certainly not something purely physical. In fact,
Sartre paradoxically asserts: “The body is the psychic object par
excellence—the only psychic object” (BN 347; 414). The lived body is
experienced as something that haunts consciousness through and through.
The body dominates the psyche; it is present even in dreams, and the body
we experience from within is itself psychically constituted. This is what
Sartre means when he states: “I exist my body” (BN, 351; 418).

The objectified body of others and the felt body

By contrast, the material, objective body, the body as idealized in the
natural and life sciences (physics, biology, physiology) is, in Sartre’s pithy
phrase, the “body of others” (le corps d’autrui), that is the body as
constituted by the anonymous and collective other (l’autre) in which I also
participate. Sartre distinguishes sharply between this body understood as
an object in the world, seen from “the physical point of view”, the “point
of view of the outside, of exteriority”19, and the body as experienced from
within. From within, the body as lived is invisible, impalpable, “ineffable”
(BN, 354; 421). I do not know, for instance, experientially that I have a
brain or endocrine glands (BN, 303; 365): that is something I learn from
others, from science textbooks, from conversations with doctors, from
scientific investigations, PET scans, and so on. Likewise, I do not know
the precise inner anatomy of my body. I have, as it were, only a
phenomenologically experienced “folk” anatomy: where I think my

18
See, however, Jane Duran, “Sartre, Gender Theory and the Possibility of
Transcendence”.
19
“[…] le point de vue du dehors, de l’extériorité” (BN, 305; 367).
16 Chapter One

stomach is, where I think I can feel my liver, where I believe the heart is
located, and so on. This folk-map can be more or less well informed by
science, more or less accurate, but this scientific map, superimposed on the
felt body, does not necessarily coincide with the body as felt. I can
visualize my ulcerous stomach but I live its discomfort in a different way
(BN, 355-56; 423).20 I feel my heart pounding when I run, but normally I
do not apprehend it at all. There is an immediately intuited or felt body,
Merleau-Ponty’s “phenomenal body”, le corps phénoménal. He writes:

As far as bodily space [l’espace corporel] is concerned, it is clear that there

is a knowledge of place which is reducible to a sort of co-existence with
that place, and which is not simply nothing, even though it cannot be
conveyed by a description or even by the mute reference of a gesture. A
patient of the kind discussed above, when stung by a mosquito, does not
need to look for the place where he has been stung. He finds it straight
away, because for him there is no question of locating it in relation to axes
of co-ordinates in objective space, but of reaching with his phenomenal
hand a certain painful spot on his phenomenal body [son corps
phénoménal]. (PP,105; 122-23)

Merleau highlights the dexterity of this phenomenal body which has an

immediate relationship to itself. Sartre prefers to point up the manner in
which objective science challenges our own immediate corporeal self-
presence. Thus he writes:

The disease as psychic is of course very different from the disease known
and described by the physician, it is a state. There is no question here of
bacteria or of lesions in tissue, but of a synthetic form of destruction. (BN,
356; 424)

In this example, Sartre claims my disease is in fact objectified by others

who can often apprehend it better than I can.
However, most of the time, this felt body is non-objectified and
experienced in a diffuse, amorphous and almost invisible manner (which is
precisely its mode of appearing). It becomes obtrusive in certain forms of
illness (such as when I become dizzy or nauseous), or failure (the stone is
too heavy to lift), or disability (the anorexic experiences her body as too

20
Or, for example, in challenging Freudian psychoanalytic accounts of the child’s
fascination with holes, Sartre claims that the child could never experience his own
anus as a hole (as part of the objective structure of the universe). The child learns
this from another person (see BN, 612-613; 704).
 Sartre’s Treatment of the Body in Being and Nothingness 17

gross), or (as he emphasizes) in the look of the other.21 The other’s look is
a peculiar form of experience of embodiment. As Sartre writes perceptively,
I do not see the other’s eyes when I experience his or her look; rather, the
other appears to me to be out in front of their eyes: “The other’s look hides
his eyes; he seems to go in front of them” (BN, 258; 316).
Furthermore—and this is also Sartre’s original contribution—even
when I see and touch my body, I am in these situations experiencing my
body from without, from the point of view of another: “I am the other in
relation to my eye”. I can see my eye as a sense organ but I cannot, pace
Merleau-Ponty, “see the seeing” (BN, 304; 366). I see my hand, Sartre
acknowledges, but only as an external thing. It is simply an object lying on
the table like any other object. I cannot see the sensitivity of the hand or its
mineness: “For my hand reveals to me the resistance of objects, their
hardness or softness, but not itself. Thus I see this hand only in the way
that I see this inkwell. I unfold a distance between it and me” (BN, 304;
366). I see my hand as another object in the world. In other words, my
sight (and indeed my touch) manifests my body to me in precisely the
same way as it is available to another. Here Sartre and Merleau-Ponty are
in fundamental disagreement. Merleau, following Husserl, emphasizes the
feeling body as a continuing presence in cases of seeing and touching (the
body is never absent from the perceptual field); whereas Sartre maintains
that our acts of perceiving objectify what we perceive and displace the
feeling onto the felt. In Sartre’s terminology, thetic or positional con-
sciousness is objectifying or reifying. Physicians and others have an
experience of my body, but they experience it as a piece of the world, “in
the midst of the world” (au milieu du monde, BN, 303; 365). This is the
body in its “being-for-others” (être-pour-autrui, BN, 305; 367). Of course,
both Sartre and Merleau-Ponty agree that when the body is functioning
normally, I do not notice it at all; it does not become salient in my
consciousness.
Sartre claims that my own body is primarily present to me in this “for-
others” (pour-autrui) way, or in what might today be called the third-
person approach. He writes:

Now the body, whatever may be its function, appears first as the known
[…] the body—our body—has for its peculiar characteristic the fact that it
is essentially that which is known by the Other. What I know is the body of
another, and the essential facts which I know concerning my own body
come from the way in which others see it. (BN, 218; 270-71)

21
In Ideas II, Husserl had already distinguished between normal or optimal cases
of experiencing and impaired ones, e.g. touching a surface with a blistered finger.
18 Chapter One

Despite this dominance of the pour-autrui body, Sartre strongly rejects the
view that our ontology of the body should begin from this third-person,
anonymous, “externalist” (du dehors, BN, 303; 365) view. This is, as he
puts it graphically, “to put the corpse at the origin of the living body” (BN,
344; 411). To invoke a concept from Gilbert Ryle, it would be, for Sartre,
a “category mistake”—indeed precisely the mistake made by all previous
philosophy—to attempt to unite the first-person experienced body with the
third-person “body of others” (corps des autres, BN, 303; 365), such that
the fundamental fissure between the two approaches is elided. This is
indeed a profound conceptual confusion, as far as Sartre is concerned.

The invisible body in the primacy of the situation

Rejecting this third-person, externalist, body-of-others approach, Sartre
maintains one must start from the recognition that, first and foremost, our
experience is not of the body as such (or indeed of our own consciousness
as such), but rather, of the world, or the situation: “Our being is
immediately ‘in situation’; that is, it arises in enterprises and knows itself
first in so far as it is reflected in those enterprises” (BN, 39; 76). And
again: “[T]he body is identified with the whole world inasmuch as the
world is the total situation of the for-itself and the measure of its
existence” (BN, 309; 372). We do not first experience ourselves as
embodied and then experience the world as impinging on our bodies, but
rather we are completely out there in the world: “The concrete is man
within the world in that specific union of man with the world which
Heidegger, for example, calls ‘being-in-the-world’” (BN, 3; 38).
It is because of our intentional directedness to the world that we have
to overcome, surpass, transcend the body. The whole thrust of human
subjectivity is to overcome or cancel itself, to negate or “nihilate”
(néantiser) itself by intending towards the world. Intentionality is world-
directed. The embodied consciousness has to “surpass” itself, go beyond
itself toward the world: this is the thrust of the long Chapter Three on
“Transcendence”, which tries to set out the manner in which the for-itself
transcends. This “surpassing” (dépassement) constitutes the essence of
intentionality understood as self-transcendence. This surpassing of the
body, however, does not mean its elimination: “The body is necessary
again as the obstacle to be surpassed in order to be in the world; that is, the
obstacle which I am to myself” (BN, 326; 391). For Sartre, our
transcendence towards the world is part of what he takes to be our original
“upsurge in the world”: “But it is we ourselves who decide these very
dimensions by our very upsurge [notre surgissement] into the world and it
 Sartre’s Treatment of the Body in Being and Nothingness 19

is very necessary that we decide them, for otherwise they would not be at
all” (BN, 308; 370).
Sartre frequently speaks of the “upsurge” of the pour-soi towards the
world, of the “upsurge” of the other in my world, and so on. In a sense,
this upsurge is the primal situation: consciousness and world emerging
together in one blow. Merleau-Ponty also speaks of the “unmotivated
upsurge of the world”.22 For Sartre, this upsurge has both a certain
necessity and a certain contingency, this combination he calls “facticity”.
For Sartre, paradoxically, while the body is that which necessarily
introduces the notion of perspective and point of view, at the same time
the body is a contingent viewpoint on the world. Our body exemplifies the
very contingency of our being: it is a body in pain, or whatever. To
apprehend this contingency, is to experience “nausea”: “A dull and
inescapable nausea perpetually reveals my body to my consciousness”
(BN, 338; 404). Being embodied brings ontological un-ease (dis-ease) or
discomfort which is essential to the functioning of the for-itself. The for-
itself can only function because it already is a body.
For Sartre, as for Husserl, consciousness requires incarnation, which
situates and locates consciousness, gives it a point of view, and makes it
possible as consciousness. Sartre writes: “[T]he very nature of the for-
itself demands that it be body, that is, that its nihilating escape from being
should be made in the form of an engagement in the world” (BN 309;
372). Moreover, the world in which we are embodied is a world that has
been humanized by us: “the world is human” (BN, 218; 270): “The body is
the totality of meaningful relationships to the world […]. The body in fact
could not appear without sustaining meaningful relations with the totality
of what is” (BN, 344: 411).
Sartre insists on the synthetic union between body and world. Merleau-
Ponty also comments on the remarkable fit there is between my body and
the world. The visible world has just that array of colours which my eyes
are attuned to register. In The Visible and the Invisible, he writes: “[T]he
seer and the visible reciprocate one another [se réciproquent] and we no
longer know which sees and which is seen” (TVTI, 139; 181). Similarly,
according to Merleau in “Eye and Mind”23: “The mirror appears because I
am seeing-visible [voyant-visible], because there is a reflexivity of the
sensible. […] My outside completes itself in and through the sensible”
(EM, 168; 24). And in his “Working Notes” (May 1960), Merleau says
that the flesh is a “mirror phenomenon” (TVTI, 255; 303). Sartre too sees

22
“[…] le jaillissement immotivé du monde” (PP, xiv; viii).
23
L’Œil et l’esprit (cited as EM with English then French pagination).
20 Chapter One

the embodied subject as intertwined with the world. On the other hand, he
rejects the deep significance that Husserl and Merleau-Ponty accord to the
phenomenon of the “intertwining” (Verflechtung in German, l’interlacs in
French) in the double sensation, to which we shall now turn.

Sartre on intertwining and the “double sensation”

As we have seen, Sartre clearly distinguishes between my body as
experienced (ambiguously and non-objectively) by me in the first person,
and the body as it is perceived or known by me occupying the perspective
of another person. These points of view are irreconcilable and indicate an
ontological gulf that separates the two dimensions. These different
“bodies” underpin different and irreconcilable ontologies. Sartre’s analysis
of the well-known phenomenon of the double sensation aims to reinforce
this irreconcilability between these opposing “ontological” dimensions.
Although many philosophers think the phenomenon of the “double
sensation” is a discovery of Husserl or Merleau-Ponty, in fact it is a
recurrent theme in nineteenth-century psychologies, from Weber24 to
Katz.25 Husserl discusses the phenomenon of the “double sensation”
(Doppelempfindung) in his Thing and Space (1907)26 and in Ideas II § 36
(152-54; Hua IV, 144-47). For Husserl, when one hand touches the other,
the sensations of touching can be reversed into sensations of being
touched. Husserl calls this “intertwining” (Verflechtung), a concept taken
up and expanded by Merleau-Ponty until it becomes the very epitome of
human engagement with the world.

24
Weber published two studies of touch: De Tactu (1834, On Touch) and Tastsinn
und Gemeingefühl (1846, Touching and General Feeling). He carefully
documented the different sensitivities to touch in various parts of the body, the
perception of weight, heat, cold, etc., and the ability of the perceiver to distinguish
when being touched by two points of a compass at the same time. In Der Tastsinn,
for instance, Weber discusses the issue of whether two sensations arise when
sensitive areas of the body touch each other. He claimed that the two sensations do
not merge into one: a cold hand touching a warm forehead, for example, reveals
both heat and cold.
25
Der Aufbau der Tastwelt (1925, The World of Touch). The German psychologist
David Katz studied at Göttingen under the renowned psychologist Georg Elias
Müller and Edmund Husserl, who was one of his doctoral examiners in 1907 and
whose seminars he continued to attend. Merleau-Ponty relies heavily on Katz’s
World of Touch for his account of touch in PP (see 315-18; 364-68). For more on
Katz, see Arnheim, Boring, Krueger and Spiegelberg.
26
Ding und Raum. Vorlesungen 1907 (Thing and Space: 1907 Lectures, cited DR
with English then German pagination. This reference is DR § 47, 137; XVI, 162.)
 Sartre’s Treatment of the Body in Being and Nothingness 21

In Ideas II § 36 Husserl is interested in the manner in which the lived-

body (Leib) is constituted as a “bearer of localized sensations”. These
localized sensations or “sensings” (Empfindisse, a Husserlian neologism)
are not directly sensed but only indirectly by a “shift of apprehension”.27
The touching hand must make movements in order to feel the smoothness
and softness texture of the touched hand. Husserl says that the “indi-
cational sensations” of movement, and the “representational sensations” of
smoothness to the touch, belong in fact to the touching right hand, but they
are “objectivated” in the touched left hand. Husserl speaks of the sensation
being “doubled” when one hand touches or pinches the other. Each hand
experiences this double sensation. Furthermore, for Husserl, the double
sensation belongs essentially to touch but does not characterize vision
(Ideas II § 37); there are no comparable visual sensings. We see colours
but there is no sensing colour: “I do not see myself, my body, the way I
touch myself” (Ideas II § 37, 155; IV, 148). All Husserl allows is that the
eye is a centre for touch sensations (the eyeball can be touched, we can
feel the movement of the eye in the eye-socket through muscle sensations,
and so on). Overall, in these discussions, Husserl employs the double
sensation to distinguish touch from vision and to accord primacy to touch.
For Husserl (following Aristotle), it is primarily touch that anchors us in
the body. He writes:

Everything that we see is touchable and, as such, points to an immediate

relation to the body, though it does not do so in virtue of its visibility. A
subject whose only sense was the sense of vision could not at all have an
appearing body. […] The body as such can be constituted originally only
in tactuality […]. (Ideas II, § 37, 158; IV, 150)

Touch localises us in the world in a way that seeing does not.

Merleau-Ponty discusses the phenomenon of the double sensation most
fully in The Visible and the Invisible.28 Since his account is well known, I
will not summarize it here, but only say that it follows Husserl closely,
except that Merleau-Ponty emphasizes the continuities between seeing and
touching and their interconnection.29

27
Husserl famously distinguishes between “sensations” (Empfindungen) that are
interpreted as properties of the object, and the “sensings” (Empfindnisse)
themselves which he speaks of as “indicational or presentational” (Ideas II, 154;
IV, 146). See Behnke, “Edmund Husserl’s Contribution”.
28
See “The Intertwining—The Chiasm”, in TVTI (130-55).
29
For a fuller discussion of the double sensation in Husserl, Sartre and Merleau-
Ponty, see Moran in Morris (ed.), Sartre on the Body.
22 Chapter One

In contrast to Merleau-Ponty, however, Sartre claims that the

phenomenon of double sensation does not reveal something essential
about embodiment. For Sartre, the double sensation is simply a contingent
feature of our embodied existence and is not a significant or exemplary
phenomenon. Sartre claims the double sensation can easily be removed by
morphine which makes my leg numb and insensitive to being touched
(BN, 304; 366). The intertwining of touching and touched is not revelatory
of our being-in-the-world. Rather, for Sartre, to touch and be touched
reflect different “orders” or “levels” of being. When one hand touches the
other hand, I directly experience the hand that is being touched first. In
other words, I am intentionally directed at the object. It is only because of
the possibility of a certain reflection that I can turn back and focus on the
sensation in the touching hand. This reflection is not inbuilt into the
primary act of intending. Sartre maintains that this constitutes ontological
proof that the body-for-me and the body-for-the-other are entirely separate
intentional objectivities. Merleau-Ponty’s metaphysical use of the double
sensation, then, is precisely the opposite of Sartre’s. Merleau-Ponty claims
that both vision and touch exhibit this “doubling” (dédoublement) and,
furthermore, that this doubling-up and crossing over, this “interlacing”
(l’interlacs) and “chiasm” is precisely constitutive of human being-in-the-
world. Sartre, on the other hand, wants to prioritize not one hand touching
the other, but one body touching or caressing the other’s body; where a
caress is already a touch that has overcome mere touch and which is
setting itself up as flesh precisely in order to awaken and reveal the flesh
of the other. Primacy, however, is given to the other in the caress, not to
the reflexivity of self-experience. Intercorporeity, for Sartre, is prior to and
is the source and the ground of self-experience. Sartre also appears—
although he does not make this thematic—to contrast seeing and touching.
“Being-seen” (être vu: BN, 259; 316) is a particularly informative form of
self-experience through the other. I experience myself as vulnerable,
exposed, caught in a particular place and time, seized and frozen by the
look. Touching, on the other hand, sets up a different chain of relation-
ships.
The other is first and foremost not an object that appears in my visual
horizon (although he or she can appear thus) but rather the one who sees
me, who characterizes me, who fixes me in the “look”. The other does not
present himself or herself to me primarily as an object, but precisely as
another subject for whom I am an object. In the look of the other, the “I”
of pre-reflective experience encounters the “me” as posited by the other’s
gaze, and I experience the identity between these two as an ontological
bond. As Sartre proclaims: